All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in collaboration with YourOneLife (YOL) app has announced the Happiness rankings and awards.
In a conversation with Yogi Kochhar, founder YOL Happiness programme that has been duly approved for adoption and introduction as a credit course in the higher education space, T G Sitharaman, chairman, AICTE, asked to expand the scope and scale of the happiness programme.
The awards have been curated by YOL team under the aegis of AICTE and applications are invited from all higher education colleges in India, an official release said.
The initiative is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concern around the screen time of six hours per day that is consumed by the random viewing. “Technology is a brilliant tool, however it can be both a boon or a bane. The trillion dollar valuations of some of the popular social media companies have colonised one billion Indians’ mind share for up to $ 400 billion or 40% of their valuations. Indian mind is our sovereign asset and human resource and capital and we need to reclaim, secure, and grow our Mindshare in India,” Kochhar said.
To guard against this brain drain, YOL on happiness has been approved by AICTE and is now being released to institutions so that all students can use it, Sitharaman said. From this session onwards institutions will be rated on the YOL happiness index approved by AICTE even as institutions can adopt it as a credit bearing elective, blended or audit course. This will check the depletion of attention spans and improve assimilation of all content taught and is pertinent for all students across all subjects and semesters, he added.
“This will give us the ground swell with millions of students adopting it to contest and lay a tangible and accurate claim to the rankings in the next year. We shall be sending this note to the Gallup Inc. that undertake the random survey on world happiness based on a sample size of only 3000 persons per country. That is the basis on which they release the world happiness rankings and ask them to take cognisance of this step. We suffer from their optical bias,” Kochhar explained.